MIT Comparative Media Studies: News

NML's Van Someren interviewed for Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning

2009-06-22T19:11:41Z

Project New Media Literacies has produced videos to help teach kids how new media creators go about creating. The MacArthur Foundation, an NML sponsor, featured the videos on its Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning blog:

In the challenge "Expressing Characters across Multimedia," youth practice the skill of "transmedia navigation" by first learning about storytelling, and then watching a video with NBC's Heroes creators Mark Warshaw and Jessie Alexander. The two discuss how they use the characters in the show across different media, such as in a graphic novel or even through toys. Students then explore how the character Claire Bennett navigates and is featured in different media platforms, including the television show, in her Myspace account, and as an image in a graphic novel. "Originally the video collection was somewhat static," says Anna van Someren, Creative Manager, Project New Media Literacies. "But we've pushed it a lot farther now. We wanted to move toward a new framework - the Learning Library - that allows users to interact with the material. It's a much more community-based, dynamic experience now."

Podcast: "Anecdotes from a Lifetime of Electronic Product Creation"

2009-05-29T15:38:48Z

A long lifetime of developing electronic consumer products has taken Ralph Baer from vacuum tube through microprocessor designs. Although the technology has undergone vast changes, the underlying motivation for, and execution of, the process has not changed radically. Baer cited numerous examples of specific product designs that made it all the way through the process to a successful product and drew some conclusions from that experience that shed some light on the continuum of invention, development, and marketing novel product ideas.

Boston Phoenix highlights Media Lab work, including Center for Future Civic Media

2009-05-15T16:50:13Z

In 2006, Alyssa Wright, then a Media Lab student studying mapping, tackled a similar goal: she created a walking memorial in Boston to commemorate civilian deaths in Iraq. Shocked at the "astronomical" discrepancy between the actual civilian death count (she estimates it was up to 250,000) and what Americans thought the death count was (around 9000, she says), Wright wanted to make an impact. So she hit the streets with an exploding backpack. "We really don't have a sense of what it's like in someone else's shoes, but technology can bridge that gap," says Wright, who tracked media-reported deaths in Baghdad and overlaid them onto a map of Boston. When she wandered into an area of the city that corresponded with a Baghdad death, her backpack exploded with white confetti, each piece inscribed with the name of someone who'd died. These days, Wright is channeling her tech-meets-art-meets-protest angle into Hero Reports, a Manhattan-based Web operation that tracks courageous moments among everyday people by collecting e-mails, phone calls, and letters, and then mapping positive news. It's a direct counterbalance to New York City's "See Something, Say Something" campaign, which encourages people to look at each other with suspicion. Hero Reports is not just a Web site. The project, which she began at the Media Lab's Center for Future Civic Media, also uses an open-source mapping platform, which allows for greater customization. Most of all, it shows how technology can change social engagement and political decisions. Which is exactly what Wright wants.
From "Inventing the Future", Boston Phoenix

Video: Media in Transition 6: "Summary Perspectives"

2009-05-13T19:09:12Z